Department of Telecommunications Opatija, 2012 Monitoring and Analysis of Player Behavior in World of Warcraft Mirko Suznjevic, Maja Matijasevic, Borna Brozovic University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing Unska 3, Zagreb, Croatia {mirko.suznjevic, maja.matijasevic,

Department of TelecommunicationsProblem  How to monitor application level player behavior in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Paying Game (MMORPG)?  Player behavior at application level affects load (both network and server)  Client side solution – wJournal  Results enable:  Seamless player behavior monitoring  Better infrastructure planning and optimization Opatija, /18

Department of TelecommunicationsOutline  Problem  Introduction  Categorization of user actions  wJournal  Measurement study  Results  Conclusion Opatija, /18

Department of TelecommunicationsIntroduction  Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Paying Game (MMORPG)  Players assume the role of a character (in a persistent virtual world) and take control over many of that character's actions  Numbers constantly increasing  460 MMORPGs active / in development (mmorpg.com)  54 million MMO players in USA alone (NewZoo)  Business models  Subscription based  Selling content updates  Selling virtual items (micro transactions) Ottawa, October /18

Department of Telecommunications Number of subscriptions Opatija, /18 I. V. Geel. (2012, Mar) Mmodata charts v3.8. [Online]. Available:

Department of Telecommunications Player behavior at the application level  Session lengths – OK  Number of players – OK  Session composition – ?  How to measure what exactly players do in MMORPG?  Many possible (inter)actions  Vast virtual worlds  Possibility of countless different situations  Classification (grouping) of possible situations in virtual world  Generally applicable  Based on both player input and surroundings  Meaningful in relation to game design  Approach based on user actions Ottawa, October /18

Department of TelecommunicationsCategorization Ottawa, October /18

Department of Telecommunications Use case – World of Warcraft Opatija, /18

Department of TelecommunicationswJournal  World of Warcraft Journal - add-on for WoW client  Add-ons are generally self-contained user interface modification components  Can be used for multiple purposes  Can be dependant on other add-ons (possibility of libraries)  Evolution from WSA-Logger (World of Warcraft Session Activity Logger)  Better GUI  Lower resource usage Opatija, /18

Department of Telecommunications wJournal – Concept  Events are fired by WoW API when something happens within the virtual world  Some events can be assigned to action categories  Based on captured events, wJournal changes the state machine Opatija, /18 Questing Trading PvP Combat Questing Trading Session segments

Department of Telecommunications wJournal - Implementation  wJournal contains:  Lua script files (the actual code which runs the add- on)  Table of contents (metadata) file  XML file used to determine the location of, and order in which Lua scripts (files with.lua extension) are loaded  Add-on creates the log file  Parser implemented in C# parses the log file and outputs an MS Excel spreadsheet Opatija, /18

Department of Telecommunications wJournal - Performance  WoW add-on limitation  Can write only to settings file (security reasons)  Causes add-on to take a lot of memory in long measurements  Workaround?  Add-ons can write into specific chat channels  Add-ons can toggle chat history on/off  Chat history is a log file!!!  Result – very low memory and processing requirements even in long measurements Opatija, /18

Department of Telecommunications wJournal – Screenshot Opatija, /18

Department of Telecommunications Measurements methodology Find players Install wJournal PLAY Report results Process data Submit log files Opatija, /18

Department of Telecommunications Measurement details  Duration from May 5th, 2011 to June 10th,  WoW version (Cataclysm expansion)  16 players participated  9 male and 7 female  Age between 16 and 32 years  Average 1,9 characters per player  Measured parameters:  Session segment length  Session segment probability  Location in the virtual world Opatija, /18

Department of Telecommunications Results – location  Uncategorized  Mostly (over 75%) spent in capital cities  Trading  Almost exclusively performed in capital cities  PvP combat  Focused in instanced areas  All instanced areas are equally frequently used  Dungeons  Maximum level dungeons are used 91% of the time (large amount of content is not used)  Raiding  Only two instances have ever been visited Opatija, /18

Department of Telecommunications Results – session composition  Action category Time played per probability action category Opatija, /18

Department of TelecommunicationsConclusion  How to monitor application level player behavior in MMORPGs?  Client side solution – wJournal  Detailed measurements  Difficult acquisition of players  Testing measurement study  Future work:  Tool for server and network load prediction based on measurement results Opatija, /18